This product update comes to you from our Product Manager, James Keele.
As a Product Manager, client feedback is vital to the success and ongoing development of our products. In March, we held our second client event in Melbourne, which included a focus group with a select group of clients.
At the start of these sessions, I always tell participants that we want to hear, “the good, the bad and the ugly”. In fact, I actually love negative feedback, because it comes from a place of passion and demonstrates real pain points and gives us an opportunity to problem-solve. We managed to obtain honest, raw feedback about the improvements we’ve made so far, and some valuable insights about the updates we have in store for the future.
Some of our participants have said it’s “brave” for us to elicit raw feedback. But while it’s one thing to share a product, a roadmap and ensure that we’re on the same page with clients about future developments, it is another thing to be able to shape it together.
Thank you to all the clients who graciously gave their time and shared feedback. We’re working to make the best decisions possible based on that feedback.
Here are the key takeaways from the focus group.
Blended software and services
One of the ways we want to make life easier for our clients is by allowing them to choose from our blended services and software offering. Blended software and services means clients can choose from a range of recruitment services to supplement their recruitment process on an ad-hoc or ongoing basis.
Perhaps you’re time poor and want someone to rank 50-100 candidates on a one-off basis. Perhaps you want to order some behavioural testing or skills tests. Or, perhaps you prefer to recruit, but receive video interviews of your top 5 shortlisted candidates straight to your inbox. Whatever recruitment support you need, in recruitment marketing, shortlisting, employer branding or online learning, the Scout Talent team can step in to assist.
In the focus group, we sought feedback about the best way to present clients with these options to choose from specialist recruitment services.
Our focus group shared that the language we used to present this option wasn’t clear and needed more context. (Services-enabled Software was a term that didn’t make much sense to people!) But overall, our participants shared that this offering was extremely valuable. Just knowing that the option was there in a time of great need gave them peace of mind. Many didn’t know that we could deliver these services in-house as well.
Next steps: We now have an action plan for our blended services and software, using better language to make this clearer, and we’re changing the user interface to point people in the right direction for accessing our services marketplace.
Visual reporting, graphs and metics
We also requested feedback on the new graphs and key metrics we are looking to incorporate into our software. We showed “source reporting” (that is, the number of hires attributed to which sources) as well as the status distribution, or changes by recruitment team member.
We learned from participants that while this type of reporting was a great step forward from CSV files, the graphs were confusing with too many dimensions. We packed a lot of data into visuals that could be refined, but admittedly, it was a lot for people to take in.
Next steps: We’ll make the reporting less dense, show more simplified visuals and rethink the types of graphs to display information.
New User-Interface
We also showed off the first round of changes to our user interface (UI), with the following brief:
- Clean and modernise the interface
- Reduce clutter
- Use data driven decisions to show people the features used most and hide the rest (until needed).
The feedback was very positive. We also confirmed our data was indeed lining up with how people use Scout Talent software as we demonstrated which buttons and features would move into “overflow” menus to reduce clutter.
We also gained some wonderful insights about how people used Scout Talent software, and identified many items to address with our existing functionality and some great ideas for future development.
Next steps: With the positive feedback about the user interface, everything seems to be on the right track. This was wonderful feedback to hear.
It was great to get in front of clients and allow some free-flowing dialogue about the good and the bad of the product updates we’re making.
James Keele
James Keele is the Product Manager for Scout Talent. He has a background in IT and Software Product Management specialising in the B2B space for the past 3+ years. James’ role is to manage Scout Talent’s product roadmap and software development, aligning them with the overall Scout Talent strategic vision. He is passionate about user experience, automation and the creative process of development.
